Elizabeth Reis
Professor at the University of Oregon.
Elizabeth Reis is professor and chair of the women’s and gender studies department at the University of Oregon.
Posts by Elizabeth Reis
- Bioethics Forum Essay
A Historic Intersex Awareness Day
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis year’s Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, marks a historic pivot. Last week, Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that its physicians would no longer perform certain nonconsensual infant genital surgeries on babies born with atypical genitals. They join the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which made a similar announcement in July and even apologized to its former intersex patients. Intersex advocates have been working toward this goal for decades.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Teaching Medical Ethics During the Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDespite the disruptive changes to my undergraduate medical ethics class this semester, my students have learned a lot about the paradox that the coronavirus presents: it is an unprecedented event, beyond the experience of nearly everyone alive today, and yet it puts on grim display the well-known problems of inequality that chronically plague the United States. Since week six of the semester, I have readjusted each unit on the syllabus to address some of the ethical issues that Covid-19 has brought to the fore, familiar challenges that have been stressed and distorted in astonishing ways by the pandemic.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Who Decides? Medical Intervention for Transgender and Intersex Children
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWho should decide whether medical intervention on a child’s body is necessary? Ideally, the person who will undergo the treatment should have a say in these decisions. Patients themselves, even if they are children, should understand all their options and assent to whatever procedures are on the t...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
What’s Truly Outrageous About Intersex?
Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
New York City’s Compromise on Dangerous Circumcision Practice Leaves Infants at Risk
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI would guess that most Americans, even Jewish Americans, had never heard of metzitzah b’peh until the recent controversy between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the New York City Department of Health. This phrase, translatable as suction by mouth, refers to a custom performed after a circumcision in which...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Rites and Wrongs: Changing a Ritual from Within
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe previously obscure ultra-Orthodox Jewish rite of metzitzah b’peh (oral suction) has burst into the news lately and raised critical questions about genital surgery, consent, First Amendment rights, tradition, and the representation of Jews. I would guess that most Americans, even Jewish-Amer...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Flip-flop over Foreskin
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe American Academy of Pediatricians recently released a statement saying that the health benefits of circumcision outweighed the risks. This pronouncement contradicts the Academy’s earlier ruling, just thirteen years ago in 1999, which stated unequivocally that the health benefits of the pr...Read the Post
